Project 3

01 About Project

Like most book lovers, I am also a part of the Goodreads community and have been mainly using it for cataloging and reading reviews. As it is the largest online community of readers, undoubtedly it has many prominent features to offer its users.
But it doesn't mean it provides an overall good user experience. I have been using the website for almost 4 years but I still find myself disengaged and this same con is very well known in the community. For this reason, I was inspired to redesign a few of the most visited pages on the website.

02 Project Goals

Before I define the project goals, it is important to mention the pages that I have chosen to redesigned.
These are the four most visited pages of the website:
1. The Registration page
2. Home page
3. My Books page and
4. Individual Book page

Goals
1. To give a cleaner and updated UI design to all the above mentioned pages.
2. To minimize visual clutter (which is also the most common concern of its users) and decrease the number of clicks to navigate through the website.
3. To reduce features which I think are unnecessary and barely used.
4. Last but not the least, through all these to improve the overall user experience of their website.

03 Research

i. Overview

As mentioned, I was inspired to take up this redesign project based on my experience with the website. So as a part of the process when I researched other users' experiences using the website, I found similar pain points to mine. Just not that, I had also discovered varied issues faced by users who use Goodreads more dynamically than I do.

ii. User Research

Due to time constraint and limited resources, I used forums, articles and various reviewing platforms to get an overall idea about user pain points with Goodreads.

ii.a Research Breakdown

Sources

• Sitejabber.com
• Trust-pilot.com
• Amazon Customer reviews
• Reddit and Quora threads
• Blog Posts
• Google Play Store and App Store

From my research I have noted some of the most common pain points and positives of the website. Here is a list of positives that users think Goodreads does well:
• Book tracking
• Reading Challenges
• Reader's Choice Awards
• Similar Book Recommendation
• Book Clubs

Going through the positive feedback, I feel book readers like the overall concept of Goodreads and they use it since it has a lot of potential features. From my understanding, some users have been using the website and/or the app for years, but due to the lack of updates and dysfunctional features, they are growing displeased.

Now as I have highlighted the positives, here are the key points that I found repeatedly from a pool of negative feedback
• outdated UI
• cluttered layout
  • news feed disoriented
  • shelving system lacks features
  • author page and details are broken
  • shady rating and reviewing system
  • inconsistent features in different devices
  • broken login system
  • redundant navigation system
  • data integrity issues

ii.b Personas

Based on my findings, I have created 2 personas to further analyze the characteristics of
large group of users.

iii. Insights

• readers want an updated UI
• authors want a better profile management system within the website
• fake reviews and ratings needs to be monitored
• some important features needs to be introduced

iv. Competitive Research

Here is a brief competitive research that I did to understand how Goodreads' competitors
are positioned among the reader's community.

Besides these, there are other book review sites/apps that people are choosing over Goodreads:
• Booklikes
  • Anobii
  • Booknshelf
  • Libib
  • Booksloth

04 Solution

i. Wireframes

ii. Visual System

Home Page

• Goodreads' homepage has 3 divisions
with barely any spacing in between.

•  In the redesign, I have maintained
    those 3 sections but spaced out and
    minimized the contents giving the
    Home Page a clean layout.

My Books Page

• This overall page layout is messy and has a lot of unnecessary clickables.

• My main focus was to keep the important
features in the left panel for easy access.

• I have also kept the secondary features
inside other drop-downs inside the page.

Book Details Page

•  Individual Book pages in Goodreads
   are very information heavy and
   consists redundant data.

•  Visually this entire page is messy and
    just to read reviews users have to
   scroll down to the bottom of the page.

•  According to user research, this page
   needed a major redesign. So I have
   firstly eliminated all the unnecessary
   details from the page.

•  Secondly, I have given the main focus
   to ratings, reviews and book summary
   part of the page.

•  Other features like recommendations,
    author details, publication details have
   been carefully placed in the page.

05 Project Learnings

Goodreads is a good product with a great mission. It helps book-lovers connect and discover books in different ways. As for my learning, I have learned a lot with this project. Right from teaching myself to use Adobe XD to getting into the design mindset for a redesign project of a 'brand' this big. Since this is my first UX project, I have mostly stuck to the basics and applied what I have been learning prior to starting the project.

Key Learning Points:
• During this project I learned how much the design thinking of a redesign project differs from a normal project. Not only I had to think like the users of website but also the original designers of Goodreads. That itself was quite a challenge to begin with.

• As Goodreads is such a content heavy site, minimizing it and trying to give it a visual refresh while keeping in mind the users needs, helped me to form a better UX understanding.

• In this project, the main constraint I had was limited user research. I believe having actual users to review the existing website(through interview and/or surveys) and test my redesign would have impacted my design.

01

About Project

02

Project Goals

03

Research